Thursday, September 11, 2008

Blast from the Past repost #9: Kevin Eastman TMNT group shot

I believe this color piece from 1988, done in markers, was created by Kevin to sell at a comic convention -- I’m not exactly sure how I ended up with it, but I think he gave it to me because I liked it so much. -- PL

I was about to say a similar thing, if It wasn't for Kevin's signature I would have sworn that was a piece of Jim Lawson art.

His style was VERY similar during the late Vol 1/early vol 2 era."

One thing which may make drawings by Jim and Kevin from that era look similar is the fact that almost all the guys in the studio were using Tombow pens for inking back then. These were ball point pens which gave a really nice solid black line which was ALMOST completely waterproof, which was nice if you had to apply white-out over it. (The downside was that the one line was all you got -- there was little or no line width variation possible with these pens.) I'm not saying that is the ONLY similarity, but it's definitely there. -- PL

"Mentski said...I really digged thefine line style back then, thanks for telling me a little more about how it came about."

You're welcome! It's easy for me today to look back and see the shortcomings of those Tombow pens, but at the time they were cool tools -- almost waterproof, cheap, and easy to find. I think I inked all of issue #19 of Volume 1 (the first issue of the "Return to New York" series) with Tombows, except for some large black areas which I used a brush to fill in. -- PL